The Love and Money of Digital Marketing

Some people work for love. They are relationship people. Right-brainers. Hug-givers.

Others work for money. They want to win. They get the deal done. Coffee is for closers, baby.

Rarely do both sensibilities coexist happily inside a single human being. And so it is with social marketing and SEO.

My man Jason Falls noted this a while back, and it stuck with me:

…the more I understand about search strategies and techniques the more I’m convinced that there exists a continental divide between the skills that make a good search engine optimization specialist and those which are the fundamental qualities of a strong social media marketing practitioner.

Though the end result of successful execution in each is similar — good SEO gets you more traffic, good SMM gets you more exposure, which actually supplements good SEO — the two practices are as fundamentally different as science and art, math and verbal.

Amen.

I am a social marketing guy. It’s all about the relationships for me; about sharing ideas with smart people, and peeling the onion together.  Maybe it’s an Italian thing… I do for you, you do for me. Bada-bing, badaboom. The bits and bytes are a necessary evil, a medium most effective when made transparent.

Every once in a while I feel the need to spend some time on the vessel, though, primarily on upgrading the enabling tools of this blog. I spent the last 48 hours on a bit of a mission cleaning things up around here. Here’s what I did, and what I learned:

• Upgraded WordPress theme to Thesis. Cleaner layout, more flexibility with less code, better and nearly automated SEO, and a breeze to install. Thanks for the reco, Chris Brogan.
• Added features to empower users. It feels like we were all in hardcore “feed” mode for a while, coming up with more and more clever ways to point the firehose of our respective lifestreams at one another. First Twitter, then the more feed-centric Facebook redesign, then Tumblr, then Posterous etc. etc. all seemed to push us in the direction of a stream of information that was all about the moment. With this obsession over the real-time web on the wane, the focus is shifting back to substantive content and the means by which we access it. I say Hoo-rah. Thesis enabled me to add more options to the home page without creating a 6-foot scroll for the user. I also added a “Best Of” section header for new visitors (another Brogan-ism), and the PostRank Widget, which automatically highlights the stuff people respond to most. Finally I beefed up my post categories, cleaned up some errant tags, and added a custom search tab. Good stuff.
• Subtracted everything I possibly could. next I pulled about 20 chicklets and snippets of various size from my main page, which improved both the cleanliness of the layout and the load time of the blog (Thesis helped with this too.) I yanked a few widgets (including ShareThis, since most of my traffic now comes through Twitter via TweetMeme and Facebook via Like), eliminated a whole bunch of directory links, and re-shuffled the widgets on my columns so all of the filtering tools were closer to the content. The important social stuff remains above the fold, but now it’s off to the side, where it belongs.

Poke around, kick the tires, let me know what you think. What’s missing? What’s unnecessary?

Try what you like on your own blog, and let me know how it goes.

A few people have both love and money, my friends. May we both be among them.

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Tagged as: Chris Brogan, Jason Falls, Posterous, Search Engine Optimization, Tumblr, TweetMeme, Twitter